Linda Somers Smith and Masters Marathon Training

Training adjustments that might help runners of all ages run faster marathons

When Linda Somers Smith talks about making the transition from Olympic marathoner to record-setting masters athlete, she admits to taking forced steps back from the training she did in her prime, but also expresses the thought that doing things the way she does now might have served her better all along. "The biggest change I have made in the last few years is mileage. I just cannot train at the mileage typically expected with marathon training," says the full-time attorney from California, whose 2:36:33 in Los Angeles last March was only 6 minutes slower than her lifetime best from the 1996 Olympic marathon trials. "If I go over 70 miles a week, my body just rebels. It doesn't matter how slow the miles are; I just can't do them." Noting that she focuses largely on speed and, to a lesser extent, strength, Somers Smith, who also blasted a 1:13:31 at the San Jose Half Marathon last fall at 49, says that she runs "very, very slow" on her easy days, and does recovery runs alone so as not to risk running faster than she should. "On easy days, I don't wear a watch or worry about my pace," she says. "I just do my loop and that's it."

Despite being highly successful over an unlikely span of years, Somers Smith ponders whether the recipe that got her to the 1996 Games was ideal. "My biggest regret is that I labeled myself a marathoner early on and never stepped out of that mentality," she admits. "I was, like many marathon runners, a slave to miles and believed there was no reason to work on speed." She also asks herself the same things many runners do -- questions that life makes unanswerable because none of us gets a do-over. "I don't know if all the miles in my 20s and 30s solidified my base, or whether I should have not done as many miles then. As a masters [runner], you have to change things around and can't grind out mile after mile at the same pace. This was probably true when I was younger, but I just didn't figure it out."

In other words, for masters marathoners, continuing to learn and apply what works best is as big a part of remaining competitive as is physical durability and mental determination. Mix in the increased pressure and willingness to maintain healthy "little" habits you may have let slide in your 20s and 30s, and you may be on the way to approaching or even exceeding your peak at 26.2 miles after the age of 40, especially, but not exclusively, if you got a later start.

DISPROPORTIONATE DISTANCE

When most longtime or older marathoners like Somers Smith give their training logs a good look, a common theme emerges: a dearth of genuine and varied speed work, either as a consequence of lots and lots of mileage or as a result of conscious prioritization. Even many of those who have been at it for a long time and rarely eschewed the weekly intervals they carried from their high school and college days into their early forays into marathon training have come to neglect old reliables, such as a hard set of 400s or 800s, in favor of exquisite specialization geared around the idea that training for 26.2-mile races is a beast unto itself. While that may in large part be true, as with everything in sport and in life, the reality is more nuanced than that.

Even as runners and coaches have made an honest effort to refine rather than replace when assembling workout schedules, certain types of faster running have been given increasingly less attention, often to the point of being rendered expendable for those past certain arbitrary age milestones.

The key to fixing this problem lies in two chief planning considerations: consciously integrating an ordered series of workouts bearing a specific purpose and reformulating the seven-day cycle. Together, these help ensure that masters marathoners regularly touch on all manner of speeds, from faster-than-5K race pace to goal marathon clip, with nothing sacrificed and the right emphasis placed on each.

Experienced coaches agree that this no-stones-unturned approach is, even for "marathon specialists," a genuine necessity. "My view is that the starting point for training is preparation for 15K to half marathon races -- say, 50 minutes to 80 minutes for many experienced runners," says Pete Pfitzinger, a two-time Olympic marathoner and exercise physiologist who has coached masters marathoners from the recreational to the near-elite. "Then you adjust in one direction for shorter races and the other direction for longer races. Only the proportions [given to various types of workouts] really change for performance in a marathon."

"I'm a strong believer in what I call full-spectrum training," offers fellow exercise physiologist and columnist Greg McMillan, who heads up the Flagstaff , Ariz.-based McMillan Elite training group but counts over-40 runners as 95 percent of his many private coaching clients. "Runners should do workouts with all four key zones--endurance, stamina, speed and sprint." The emphasis shifts, he explains, based on the demands of the goal event, but notes that every training program should have at least some workouts from each training zone. "There are many, many physiological and psychological benefits for marathoners to perform workouts outside of the marathon-specific training," he says.

LONGER CYCLES

Reduced to schematics, a sound marathon training plan includes three essential elements (medium-long runs, long runs, and fast repetitions) and three key hard efforts (marathon pace, threshold pace, and 5K-or-faster pace). These should be regarded not in concrete terms, but as anchor points. Given the variety of possible combinations, it takes careful planning to incorporate these elements and efforts into a rotation that is both easy to follow (at least on paper!) and physiologically savvy. One way to include a variety of paces in marathon training is to use 21-day cycles rather than operating on the typical one-week, seven-day cycle. This allows runners to complete every subtype of workout during each three-week period, which allows in turn for seven-day "pseudo-cycles." The basic scheme:

WEEK

1

2

3

Mon

Tues

Wed

MLR/FF

MLR/LT

MLR

Thur

Fri

LI

MI

SI

Sat

Sun

LR

LR/FF

LR/MP

MIleage

Higher

Lower

Highest

Here, MLR = medium long run, LR = long run, LI = long intervals, MI = medium intervals, SI = short intervals, LT and MP stand for lactate threshold and marathon pace, and FF = fast finish -- in the case of the Wednesday runs something between 10K and half marathon pace and in the case of the Sunday runs something between half marathon and marathon pace, with each done in a progressively faster manner throughout the fast segment of these runs. Blank days are filled with recovery runs or cross-training.

For someone shooting for a 3:15 marathon (about 7:30 pace) and presumably capable of a 5K in about 20:00, a 10K in about 42:00, and a half marathon in about 1:33:00, the schedule looks something like this:

WEEK

1

2

3

Mon

Tues

Wed

12 w/ last 2 @ 7:00 pace

10 w/ last 4 @ 6:50 pace

13 steady

Thur

Fri

8 incl. 3 x mile in 6:30, 3:00 jog rest

7 incl. 5x1000m in 4:00, 3:00 jog rest

9 incl. 12x400m in 1:35, 1:30 jog rest

Sat

Sun

20 steady

16 w/ last 2.5 @ 7:15 pace

18 w/ last 10@ 7:30 pace

MIleage

Higher

Lower

Highest

MILEAGE

The number of individual cycles preceding a two-or three-week taper can vary from three to six, depending on how fit runners judge themselves to be at the outset of "official" training. Tune-up races can and should be substituted for the harder efforts every three weeks or so, with 5K and 10K races replacing interval workouts, races between 10K and 10M taking the place of tempo or fast-finish runs, and 13.1M to 30K races serving in the role of MP runs.

SPEED VACCINE

The bulk of your focus should, of course, be on longer and harder efforts. Since most people race marathons at a pace reasonably close to their lactate threshold pace -- perhaps 10–15 seconds per mile slower for very fast runners and up to twice that for those farther back -- it not only makes sense to do a substantial amount of training at this clip, but to do it on tired legs. For this reason, tempo runs can be combined with medium-long and even long runs. This is helpful to masters in that it kills two traditionally separate birds with a single stone. By the same token, runs at or close to marathon pace for up to 30K done in training or in buildup races provide an excellent physiological and psychological dress rehearsal.

The total fraction of marathon training devoted to true speed work may appear low enough to make doing away with intervals seem like a reasonable choice, but it's not. Think of them as a marathoner's version of a vaccine or a tetanus booster: You don't need a huge amount, but skipping them altogether is unwise.

Jaymee Marty of Sacramento, whose 2:45:09 at the 2010 Chicago Marathon at age 43 made her one of the oldest first time Olympic trials qualifiers in the race's history, embodies this concept. While admitting that track work makes up a marginal fraction of her marathon prep, she doesn't discount its value. "The first real speed training I have done [in the past several years] was in prep for the 2010 masters national track champs," says Marty, who began running six years ago and first broke 3:00 in 2007 and 2:50 in 2009. "I didn't really progress much in terms of my short-distance racing speed, but I obviously became a faster marathoner after having done it."

MULTITASKING WORKOUTS

The various types of race-pace running need not always be segregated into different days. For example, progression runs in which athletes move steadily from marathon pace down to 5K or 10K race pace over the course of a 20- to 30-minute run are, though not detailed here, effective workouts. "My athletes who I help train for a marathon run all sorts of paces, such as short, near-max sprints, mile and 3K–5K–10K intervals to marathon-effort-paced training long runs," says 2:40 marathoner Nicole Hunt, an online coach who guided Marty to her 2:45:09. "A single workout can contain all the above efforts or the workout may just focus on just one. The body thrives on variety but also repetition. It is important to focus and repeat stamina-type workouts during marathon training, but equally important to sprinkle in sprints and VO2 max intervals. Focusing on a variety of different speeds increases muscle stimulation and in turn creates faster marathon leg speed."

The meat of Marty's training for Chicago last year, says Hunt, was "basically two big, hairy workouts a week: one 5K/10K/tempo speed-work day and one long run that includes no end of crazy pace work." Her other days were not just easy recovery days; usually, two of them included some combination of strides, hill drills, or short speed bouts.

Somers Smith also does two distinct hard sessions a week, with some flexibility built in lest things be going unusually well or not so well. "I don't know if any one workout is key; one is speed-oriented and the other is strength-oriented," she says. "If I feel OK, I might get another 'half-workout' in, which means I will pick it up at the end of what would otherwise be a recovery day." This, she says, changes each week, depending on how she feels in any given week.

BIKES, HILLS & THE INTANGIBLES

Inevitably, masters have to pay stricter attention to things younger runners don't, and that goes for fast folks as well as pack runners. While still threatening lifetime bests even as she reaches 50, Somers Smith doesn't hesitate to establish the differences between the present and the past. She gives a nod to both reduced running mileage and cross-training in the same breath. "Traditionally, a max of 70 miles per week is not ideal marathon training, but it seemed to work for me for Los Angeles," she says. After Los Angeles, she trained for and did a triathlon, so her mileage then went down to 40 or 50 per week, but with swimming and biking added in. "Running a hard 10 miles after riding 35," she contends, "is very much like a hard 16-mile run, but without the damage."

Also, don't forget to look upward for guidance. Marty's marathon focus has been on strength workouts in the form of hills, which often take the place of traditional tempo runs. "I mean weeks and weeks of big-ass hill workouts," she emphasizes. Masters may find her example especially palatable because running uphill allows for a high, sustained heart rate without the usual pounding.

To paraphrase any number of witticisms, it's easier to avoid injury in the first place than it is to heal. Somers Smith advises: "The biggest issue in training as a masters, regardless of what cycle you use, is to not overdo it, because once you go into a fatigued/injured/overtrained hole, it takes forever to recover -- and forever just means you are that much older when you start training again."

"I have been injured once in my short running career," adds Marty, "and that was because I didn't respect the importance of recovery." She refers not to running too fast on easy days or doing too many hard workouts, but to what runners like to relegate to unimportance by calling them "intangibles." "I tried to get away with an insane work schedule, little sleep, poor nutrition, and so on," says Marty. "I honestly believe, within some reasonable bounds, that the configuration of your training program is less important than what you do to recover from training. I mean everything from how soon you eat after you work out, whether you compress, icing niggles, stretching, rolling, massage, sleep, nutrition, et cetera.

"We hear it over and over again, but it's what happens when you're not running that determines how fast you will become."